Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Flying Lotus - 1983

"Flying Lotus, (born Steven Ellison) is an experimental hip hop music producer, disc jockey, and laptop musician from Winnetka, California...He is most famous (yet also uncredited) for the music in many of the segues of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim...His great-aunt is the late Alice Coltrane...Flying Lotus is commonly identified as a hip hop producer, but his style is drawn from many genres, including jazz, electronic, and Brazilian music. His hip hop beats are unique for their hazy, ambient sound, while his percussion is purposely slightly off time, creating a messier, more organic atmosphere..."

Hip hop is not at all what I would call Flying Lotus but who cares what I think...Here's what AMG has to say about this record:

"...Lotus layers spacy keyboards over bass-heavy beats, clearly very much influenced by the whole free jazz-based electronica and hip-hop Sa-Ra craziness that's prevalent in the L.A. area...Lotus doesn't drag out his pieces; instead, all but two of them fall neatly under four minutes, keeping 1983 from becoming a masturbatory exercise in keyboard lines and instead making it very listenable, with beats that circle around without becoming predictable, pulling jazz and Brazilian rhythms into his own electronic-based production and creating a very coherent and listenable album. The individual songs are good...but it's the entire record that has the greatest effect. It's controlled and circular but also very warm and expressive, able to have fun, to not take itself too seriously....intelligent, accessible, jazz-based electronica and left-field hip-hop..."

The thing I agree with most here is that the record as a whole is the way to go when listening to it...It also blows by; I have listened to it several times last night and this morning. It is great mood music...

Because the record is (or seems) so short, I am including two tracks from Flying Lotus's 2008 record Los Angeles, which I originally scored from Captain's Crate...